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Shinken (真剣),lit. real sword is a newly forged Japanese sword, usually for high level iaido and/or tameshigiri (cutting) practice. As opposed to iaito (a regular metal sword for iaido practice), shinken has a sharp edge and is hand made by one of approximately 250 Japanese swordsmiths active at the moment who are members of the Japanese Swordsmith Association and a few amateurs who work on the outside of the organization. Those swordsmiths are limited by law to producing no more than 24 swords a year each. This limit, along with a highly specific skills and amount of manual labor required, accounts for the high price that a shinken can fetch - starting from about $4,000 for the blade alone and going many times higher for genuine Mukansa or Ningen Kokuho blades.
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